Bethesda's Vice President of Public Relations and Marketing, Pete Hines, is often busy fending off Elder Scrolls fans asking constantly about the six main installment.
Last year, he even went out to state that Bethesda Softworks is not a vending machine, but a studio full of creative people who don't necessarily want to churn out Elder Scrolls and Fallout games one after another.
Pete Hines recently talked again about this topic in an interview published by GamesRadar. He pointed out examples of studios who have successfully branched out of the IPs they were known for. He cited Naughty Dog's The Last of Us and Guerrilla's Horizon: Zero Dawn, adding that the latter is "unbelievable" and possibly his favorite game of the year.
I’ve tried to help mitigate some of that - I went to Todd [Howard, director of Bethesda Game Studios] a couple of E3s ago and said "Everybody’s going to ask us about The Elder Scrolls 6. You have to help me, you have to help me come out and say what the studio’s path is, and when The Elder Scrolls 6 is coming, to try and manage expectations."
[The development teams] aren't just a vending machine where you press for the soda and they just go back and forth - they want to be able to stretch their legs creatively, or try a new idea, or do something different and not just fall into the same pattern.
I think you see a lot of developers do that, and quite honestly, if we didn’t have folks break from it then you don’t get Horizon: Zero Dawn. Like, how unbelievable is that game? And if [Guerrilla] just stayed on that path for what they were known for, you’d never get that game. Why would you ever think that [the creators of Killzone] would do crazy post-retro; futuristic but retro dinosaur. It might be my favorite game this year, and if they didn’t break from what they had been doing and try something different, you’d never get that. I think that’s true of a lot of studios, right? You don’t get The Last of Us if [Naughty Dog] just kept churning out Uncharted games.
Horizon: Zero Dawn was critically acclaimed and sold very well, too. Guerrilla announced that the first campaign DLC, The Frozen Wilds, will launch on November 7th.
As to Pete Hines, he also stated over and over again that Elder Scrolls VI is only coming after two big Bethesda projects. If that's the case, then fans could probably relax as that's many years of development to go through.
